Abstract: "I'm getting too old to battle it," sixty-nine-year old farmer Matthew Grant lamented in an 1987 interview. He had purchased his first sixty acres in 1947 for $3500 and eventually expanded his holdings to 190 acres, but increasing costs, low returns, and old age made him question whether or not he should keep up the struggle to retain his farm enterprise. Indeed, he was among the last black farm owners in a large section of North Carolina. "We don't have any black farmers left in Tillery," his son said, noddin g toward his father, "This is it." Only a generation
before nearly 100 Negro families had been involved in the Tillery Farm Project of Halifax County as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal
"forty acres and a mule" program to establish America's poor on land of their own.